Monday, February 13, 2006

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Weight Loss: a personal take

I believe reviews are essentially personal things and the best ones will tell you as much about the reviewer as about the thing being reviewed (never understood the “be objective” shtick dished out by editors with Buddha-like smiles). And usually I’m quite comfortable writing what I feel about a book or film, irrespective of what others have said about it. But ever so often a difficult case comes along where I have to wonder whether it might be better to take a coolly academic approach; to tiptoe around my own (undoubtedly warped) ideas about a work and try instead to imagine how it might have affected most other readers/viewers. This usually happens when a book or film leaves a strong impression on me but I still can’t really argue with the negative things others are saying about it.

Does that make any sense? The latest instance is Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Weight Loss, which I started nearly a month ago and have only now brought myself to finish. I’ve been ambivalent about it all the way through: the first 70-80 pages were very promising, and funnier than anything I had read by an Indian author in at least 3-4 years (this could be the Indian Portnoy’s Complaint, I was thinking excitedly at that stage). But then it started to drift and get tedious. Around the halfway mark I put it away, got terribly busy and didn’t read anything for a couple of weeks apart from Jaipur tourism brochures, which were also funny. Then I returned to it yesterday and to my own surprise finished the remaining 200 pages quite easily.

I know at least 5 people who disliked this book intensely, and at least one (someone whose judgement I have very high regard for) who thought it was middling at best. Plus I’ve read three scathing reviews that made some very good points. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that for all its unevenness there’s much in it that’s good – and that in particular it hasn’t received enough credit for its subversive humour and for the way it brings a degree of believability, even poignancy, to the actions of a protagonist no reader would otherwise be able to identify with (and no mother would be able to love).

Weight Loss is about the strange life (from age 11 to age 37) of a sexual deviant named Bhola, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on their lustworthiness. Bhola’s tastes are not, to put it mildly, conventional. Sex is a form of depravity for him and he fetishizes everyone from teachers to roadside sadhus to servants; he progresses from fantasizing about the portly family cook Gopinath to falling “madly in love” with a vegetable-vendor and her husband. This last obsession spans the length of the book and most of Bhola’s life – he even ends up studying at a college in an obscure hill-station hundreds of miles from his home because he wants to be near the couple. At various other stages in his life he get expelled from school for defecating in a teacher’s office, participates in an inexpertly carried out circumcision (one of the book’s many manifestations of the “weight loss” motif) and engages in sundry forms of debauchery. Agastya Sen would have barfed at some of this. Portnoy would at the very least have blushed.

And many readers will understandably be disgusted. As you might have guessed, this isn’t a particularly accessible book. From the first, it sets out to make things very difficult for the reader. The subject matter is unpleasant and gratuitous in places, and it’s easy to be put off. (I don’t have delicate sensibilities myself but I was still disturbed by some passages, and this was one reason for the two-week break in reading it.)

And yet, much as I was personally repulsed by Bhola’s twisted obsessions, I thought him convincing on his own terms: given how the author sets up and defines the character for us, I found it completely believable that he would behave the way he does; that he would, for instance, make a crucial life-altering choice on the basis of a single twisted obsession. If one of the chief purposes of fiction is to provide us a window into another way of living or thinking, Weight Loss does succeed in doing that to an extent.

The more pertinent question then is, what can we possibly gain from following the misadventures of such a grossly unbalanced character, and there’s no easy answer to that one. I don’t want to go out on a limb defending this book, but I have to point out here that it’s futile to take Weight Loss at face value. The entire premise is so extreme that the best way to approach it is to think of it as a deliberate distortion – the exaggeration of characters and situations to draw attention to the pathologies of our own lives. To this end, Chatterjee’s humour is an incredibly effective device. He’s better than almost any contemporary Indian writer at being irreverent about our sacred cows and showing us what comical little creatures we are at precisely those times when we are taking ourselves most seriously. The humour, admittedly over the top at times, also serves as a buffer, shielding the reader from some of the depressing things he has to say.

One criticism of the prose is that it’s laborious and overdone. But this very quality often helps him achieve a very specific comic effect founded on the gradual building up of hysteria. When he uses a long string of words machine gun-style to describe something, it’s done very deliberately – the effect is very different from, say, a florid writing style where adjectives are indiscriminately over-used. For instance, early in the book, when Bhola is caned by his physical education teacher, we are told that “one of his classmates, Anantaraman, a pale, sensitive, shy, nervous and complex boy, passed out”. You might argue that the simultaneous use of “pale”, “sensitive”, “shy” and “nervous” amounts to overkill but I think it gives the sentence a hysterical effect that fits very well with the overall mood of the passage. And it nicely leads up to the knockout blow provided by the last adjective, “complex” – a relatively unspecific word but a wickedly funny one in this context, and one that perfectly fits the character of the distressed Anantaraman.

P.S. After all that pontificating, let me stress that I’m not giving Weight Loss my highest endorsement – only suggesting that it’s a more interesting book than it first appears to be, and worth reexamining. And no, I still have no idea what I’m going to write in that blasted official review I have to do now.

28 comments:

I enjoyed reading this review a lot. Especially liked the line: If one of the chief purposes of fiction is to provide us a window into another way of living or thinking, Weight Loss does succeed in doing that to an extent.

I've only read Chatterjee's most famous work, English August which was also both humorous and disturbing and this one seems interesting enough to try.

And now that I've read this review, I would also like to read the official one just to see the difference in the two. Could you please put up the link as a reply to this comment?

However you review was far better than the half-way mark! :) Will pick this one up soon enough. I am still reeling from the aftereffects of books recently read.

Sexuality in literature somehow is appreciated only if done "tastefully". Even deviation must be captured as though one is smoking rose petals. When it's otherwise. The real world is hardly seamless. It is jerky, random, rapid, parallel and patchy. (There. That's a lot of adjectives!)

Anirudh: I suspect the official review will "borrow" a lot from this one!

Neha: thanks for the kind words but I must warn you against trusting my word on this one. My response to this book was a very particular one and I don't know how many other people will be affected in the same way.

I read "English August" and "The Mammaries of the welfare state" by UC long back. I found the former hilarious, and the latter even more hilarious. Since then I've wondered if he'd write another book, and there he is with "Weight Loss". Even with those books, I think the situations and descriptions got really gross out, but ended up being hilarious reads.

I will pick this one up (If I get this book here in states), but will keep your splendid revu in mind hehe!

I didn't like English, August much, but I might pick up this one. Deviant sex, you see. *looks off into the distance dreamily*

I have read many excellent reviews of mediocre to awful books and movies, so I don't judge books by the quality of the review, but by the content. (And that was a rider for ...) This was an excellent review, by the way. A very good read.

I somehow love reading your reviews, which makes me invariably go and buy the books you recommend, and then I end up not liking them in the end, and yet I come back on your blog to read another review and on to another liking!

Have to say, I was profoundly ambivalent about English, August - and Rana Dasgupta's outlook review of the new book brought up many of the things i found 'problematic' about Eng Aug. I think you're right about UC's superbly irreverent humour (and its rarity in IWE) - but am somehow convinced i won't like the book. it's probably the fact that UC comes across as completely identified with his protagonist, and the protagonist is usually someone alarmingly pompous, self-obsessed, with zero interest in getting rid of his class/gender type blinkers. Btw, I've been reading your blog occasionally for a while - i particularly enjoy these 'unofficial; reviews of new IWE stuff. not necessarily, as you point out yourself, as some kind of one-stop guide to book-shopping-when-in-india-next, but a great read nonetheless. thanks!

I bought and read all 3 of Chatterjee's previous books...laughed myself silly over English August, waded through the laborious prose of The Last Burden and didn't like Mammaries at all. I can't wait to add Weight Loss to my collection. This guy and Amitav Ghosh have been my fave Indian writers for years.

I have read your review on "Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Weight Loss" and it looks fine to me and greatly impressed by your review. If you are looking for some more weight loss information then you can get more information from here.

I just came across your blog about weight loss and wanted to say how fascinating your information is. I have my own weight loss blog – diet4free.blogspot.com, about my experiences. Know a good site when I see one. Keep up the good work

i read your review as well as the book, frankly its a perverted piece of shit. free country free speech etc etc, yes sure, but lets nt get carried away with it!!! its a down right digusting book which leave you with nothing but disgust, its anything but hilarious and think we as readers deserve better than this.

One 'more' redundant comment about how one agrees completely with this blog. Actually its more about identification with that feeling of enjoying a book to the hilt, one that has been uniformaly panned by critics/admirers alike. Also in agreement, Upamanyu Chatterjee's is extremely interesting Indian writing. He's rude, sarcastic even cruel. At the end of the day even fatous and pigheaded and thats delightful in an Indian author because hes not petty. Hes magnanamous. He's worth the read- everytime.

man ... same here, stuck in the middle ... and cannot get myself to finish off the book... ... and an excellent review. I like upamanyu's books.. he is a talented writer, with excellent sense of humor.

I read Weight Loss a couple of weeks back. The fetishism gets tiring after a while and the florid nature of some of the sex scenes made me feel more austere than I have in quite a while.The climax too runs along a path which left me mystified. Try as I might, I am unable to see a larger motif, until unless of course somebody wants to pull that old card, "absence of a thematics as a theme". At times when I read the book in public I was hoping my face did not convey the perversity that Mr. Chatterjee had placed in my mind. When I read I generally end up with a mental movie of direct to dvd type production values. In case of Weight Loss I wish the theater of my mind had at its disposal a censor of some sort.

Modern lifestyles have improved our quality of life but also contribute greatly to physical inactivity. Today only about 10% of public school students walk to school compared to the large no of student a generation ago. http://www.phentermine-effects.com

Disgusting it is, have reached the parts where progressing has become impossible. I also , otherwise too, think Upamanyu Chatterjee’s is highly overrated. He is not even average, leave aside brilliant. I had taken a lifetime to complete the LAST BURDEN, similar time frame for ENGLISH AUGUST. I don’t know what the hullabaloo with him is about. I don't think I will even try to finish this one....

Have to say, I was profoundly ambivalent about English, August - and Rana Dasgupta's outlook review of the new book brought up many of the things i found 'problematic' about Eng Aug. I think you're right about UC's superbly irreverent humour (and its rarity in IWE) - but am somehow convinced i won't like the book. it's probably the fact that UC comes across as completely identified with his protagonist, and the protagonist is usually someone alarmingly pompous, self-obsessed, with zero interest in getting rid of his class/gender type blinkers.